Hey! My name is Kelci, I’m a soon to be third-year Sport Science student at Moray House School of Education and Sport. This summer, I’ve had the exciting opportunity to join ISG for a 12-week Learn Foundations Internship! It’s been a great experience, and many fond memories have been fostered. I thought I’d write this blog to share a little insight into my summer, and particularly into a really interesting project I’ve had the pleasure of being involved in with my colleague Julia!
As part of my internship, our team of ten have spent many weeks reviewing Learn Ultra courses to collect data on the accessibility of these courses for the 2024-2025 academic year. In previous years, this data was analysed, compiled into reports, and shared with schools via email by our supervisors after the internship programme came to an end. This year, however, Julia and I have had the opportunity to be involved in the process. Not only did we analyse the data and compile the reports, we also developed a SharePoint site to store and share the information with schools and deaneries more efficiently, and provide them with more insightful guidance. It’s been a significant project, but an incredibly rewarding one! Here’s a little more about our SharePoint project and what we’ve been working on!
Accessibility Audits
To begin our project, we began by analysing data from both the Learn Foundations programme and the Ally accessibility tool. This was a huge task, and with limited prior experience, it quickly became a steep learning curve for the both of us. The process involved cleaning the data, running macros, performing calculations, collating statistics, and generating analysis sheets for each school. This was no small feat, given that the Learn Foundations data covered over 390 courses and Ally provided data on 335,988 items. Despite the scale of the work, we tackled it with plenty of much-needed patience and persistence. Within just three weeks, we had a fully cleaned and polished dataset ready to feed into the next phase of the project.
Reports
After the intensity of the data work, this next phase felt like a welcome change of pace. We started by creating two review templates, one for all schools and another tailored for each of the 25 schools and deaneries. To do so, we took inspiration from previous years but added our own twist of improvements and updates. One of our key additions was a personalised ‘Prioritised Recommendations’ section for each school, completely tailored to their needs. This gave the reports more practical value and helped highlight specific actions based on the data. Once these templates were approved, we moved on to populating them. With help from our manager, Robyn, we created and ran a successful mail merge to automate the school-specific reports, while manually populating the all-schools review. By this point, everything was starting to come together, and with the hardest phases now behind us, we were finally able to feel more confidence and accomplished in our progress.
SharePoint Site
As part of the project, we proposed that we create a central SharePoint site to host general information relevant to all schools, with links to individual sites for each school. This structure would make it easier to manage access and permissions while also keeping things organised, providing easier navigation for users, and keeping the information engaging and easy to read. At first, we thought this might be one of the simpler tasks, but SharePoint had other plans! It turned out to be more complex than expected, with its own quirks and yet again another learning curve. However, after many hours of trial and error (and a few moments of frustration), we successfully built and customised the sites. With the help of Power Automate we were able to set up a workflow and streamline the process of uploading and organising the reports and data onto the site, using our own custom template too, making the final result feel smooth and well-integrated.
Improvements Upon Previous Years
Julia and I were excited to have the opportunity to build on previous years’ work by adding more depth, clarity, and usability to the data shared with the schools/deaneries. We saw this as a chance to not only enhance the accessibility of the reports for all, but also to help schools and deaneries make more informed decisions about the accessibility of their Learn course designs, ultimately contributing to a better student experience across the University. To support this, we introduced several key additions:
- A detailed guidance sheet accompanying the data, explaining each column header and what it represents.
- A recommendations sheet that outlines each suggested action, along with the reasoning behind it, concisely explaining the how and why each step can make a real difference for students.
- Personalised ‘Prioritised Recommendations’ for each school, offering a clear, focused starting point for accessibility improvements.
Our hope is that these enhancements will not only make the reports easier to understand and navigate, but also empower schools with practical, targeted actions to take forward.
Thoughts, Feelings and Moving Forward
Looking back on this project, it’s hard to believe just how much we were able to accomplish – not only alongside our other responsibilities, but also within the tight timeframe we had. It’s been a truly rewarding experience. Reflecting on it all, I feel incredibly proud, not just of my own contributions, but of what Julia and I achieved together. It’s been a challenging but fulfilling journey, and I’m hopeful that the work we’ve done will have a lasting positive impact on the accessibility of Learn Ultra for staff and students alike.
Internship as a Whole
In addition to this work, I was also involved in another key project with fellow intern Holly, where we collaborated with the short course marketing team to analyse and visualise data from three of the University’s learning platform subscriptions (edX, FutureLearn, and Coursera). We explored metrics such as enrolments, certificates achieved, and participation rates from the past year, helping us build a clearer picture of how these platforms are being used. We got to use the Flourish software, which was new to both of us, and which we were keen to learn, and the results definitely paid off in our report. Juggling my daily internship tasks, the personal project with Holly, and the SharePoint project definitely was a delicate balancing act at times, but with perseverance and good time management it was more than possible and I reaped the benefits.
Overall, my time with ISG has been a wonderful and truly eye-opening experience with a whole host of opportunities that I never thought I’d have the privilege of participating in and I’m incredibly grateful for the support I’ve received during my time here. Thank you for taking the time to read this blog, and I hope that it provided you with some insight into my summer and the projects I’ve been working on!
